Abstract

Pervasive computing offers environments in which user needs or tasks are fulfilled without demanding their attention. This requires discovering a service or a set of services and interacting with them in response to context (i.e. user presence, user activity, user location, temperature level, light intensity level etc.). In pervasive computing environments, services available in the environment may be heterogeneous with regard to different service discovery protocols (e.g., UPnP, SLP, JINI, etc.) being used for their publication, discovery and interaction. Contextual service composition may involve discovery of and interaction with heterogeneous services based on context, raising an issue of service heterogeneity in pervasive computing environments. In this paper, we put forward a framework that addresses this issue. The proposed framework has been designed, implemented and evaluated, details of which are provided in the paper. The performance evaluation results indicate the system can perform well in both local and distributed settings.